Partitioning 400 gig drive

[Markbnj]

Merry Christmas, everyone .

My wife bought me a 400 gig Western Digital drive for Christmas, SATA1. I'm thinking about how to partition it (or whether to). I have a 74 gig Raptor as my primary, that has Windows and the Program Files stuff. Does it make sense to set aside a 74 gig partition on the new drive, and ghost the Raptor to it for backup? That should leave like 300 gigs for videos and whatnot. If I wanted to do this, would I just make a seperate 74g partition, assign a logical drive to it, and format it as usual? Or do drive imaging programs want the partition to be unassigned?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[wchou]

congratulation. u are one lucky sob.

 

[Trey22]

You have my vote for you backup/image plan.

I use Acronis TrueImage, but create an image to an external USB hard drive.

You can go ahead and create your two partitions and format them... I don't believe your image program will be looking for an unassigned partition.

 

[John]

Leave your raptor as-is and use the 400GB for backups.

 

[caz67]

Originally posted by: John
Leave your raptor as-is and use the 400GB for backups.

thats what i would do..

 

[WackyDan]

You don't really need to make the backup partition 74gig like the raptor..... Imaging will compress the contents....

Plus/or on the flip side ... Leaving it 74gig won't do much good if your intent is to recover the image to that partition as you'll need more room to expand the image onto that partition.... The reality is... If your just using it as a place for backup and not recovery... I wouldn't even worry about a separate partion.

 

[Markbnj]

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I do plan to leave the raptor as is, and just back it up to the 400 somehow. I haven't used a disk imaging program before. Sounds like I don't need a seperate partition, so I am assuming it just creates an image file, something like a .iso file for DVD? I could put this anywhere on the 400g drive, and one benefit is that I would have plenty of room if I wanted to recover there (say, if the raptor had a head crash or something).

My original thought ran like this: raptor crashes, I get another system drive, replace it, and copy the image off of the 400 on to the new drive. I guess as an alternative I could recover on the 400 and then make it bootable.